Many future concepts rely on small autonomous systems, working together in groups or swarms. The small size and potentially large numbers of such systems that might be demonstrated together, poses a severe challenge to existing range tracking systems to provide time-and-space-position information (TSPI) for individual systems under test. The emphasis on increasing the level of autonomy for these systems further exacerbates the problem, by removing humans from the control loop. Because of their autonomous behaviors, it is even more important to maintain accurate TSPI for each platform involved. The TSPI is necessary to support range safety, platform recovery operations and to provide useful information to the test sponsor on the relationship between individual platforms to aggregate group behavior.
Existing range radar and optical tracking systems are not equipped to provide TSPI in the Physical/Battlespace domain for large numbers of small objects, particularly in instances where a combination of air, ground, sea and/or subsurface vehicles are used in concert. Such scenarios are being studied for use in a number of future applications. Examples include urban assault, port security and homeland defense missions, where unmanned systems operate together to not only collect information, but to accomplish complex tasks without human intervention, such as breaching structures and neutralizing threats. The use of collaborative unmanned vehicles allows task specialization between platforms, as well as autonomous re-tasking of assets, to overcome loss or failure of others in the group. No test range currently exists that can unobtrusively monitor the actions of large groups of diverse autonomous systems. TSPI is required not only in support of range safety, but also provide information to test sponsors, allowing evaluation of group behavior. The potential for large numbers of small, specialized autonomous systems, combined with the unscripted, autonomous behavior, creates a difficult problem for existing range sensors to maintain TSPI for individual platforms within the group. Traditional methods of tracking small objects rely on the use of signature enhancers, optical or RF, that increase the object's signature, allowing it to be tracked by existing range instrumentation radars or optical trackers. However, these systems are relatively large and can require significant power to operate.
For small autonomous systems, applying traditional translators or beacons may not be practical due to platform constraints on the payload size, weight, power consumption and/or impacts to the platform's dynamic properties. Furthermore, as the number of platforms involved in the test increases, any concept that requires instrumentation of individual platforms must ensure that the instrumentation can be accomplished rapidly, without the need for complex integration or calibration.
The nature of autonomous systems and the wide variety of potential missions that can be explored drive the need to perform testing under a very wide array of terrain, vegetation and topologies. Instrumenting a permanent facility would not allow the user the flexibility needed to adequately test unmanned autonomous systems (UAS) or other systems under all desired conditions.